The present invention relates to agricultural equipment and more particularly to agricultural equipment for the sowing of grain such as wheat.
The sowing of grain is a very old art and the equipment likewise goes back many years. Perhaps, the first agricultural implement for sowing of seed was merely a stick or branch with which the farmer opened a shallow trough in the soil, where seeds were deposited, covered and later grown into a food crop. Such methods were slow and farming was limited to a small scale. Agricultural technology today is an advance art. The agricultural equipment available today overcomes many of the difficulties and problems encountered by the farmer in yesteryear. Modern sowing equipment satisfactorily serves its purpose particularly if soil conditions are at an optimum. If soil conditions are not good, however, many age old problems still persist. A problem which is common to many farm implements which penetrate the soil is the accumulation of soil on the penetrating portion. Such problems are common to plows, cultivators and the like. Similar problems occur with any disc type farm implement.
Various attempts have been made to solve such soil accumulation problems particularly with regard to disc type implements. In some instances, a knife blade has been disposed adjacent the disc blade. The knife blade serves to scrape accumulated soil from the disc blade. Such knife blades, however, have not been completely satisfactory in that they wear and either become ineffective or they must be adjusted in accordance with the amount of wear that has taken place. An alternative approach has been to utilize a saucer-shaped scraper which may be urged toward the disc blade, for example, utilizing a spring. Although the spring mechanism automatically adjusts the scraper in accordance with the amount of wear that has taken place, this also has failed to serve as a complete solution to the problem. The difficulty encountered with such saucer type scrapers is that soil may continue to accumulate on the disc blade with the saucer merely riding over such accumulation. The present invention overcomes such problems and provides a highly satisfactory mechanism for scraping or removing soil from disc blades. The removal of accumulated soil from a disc blade is particularly important in the case of sowing equipment since any accumulation of soil on the disc blades may prevent proper depositing of seed in the trough cut by the cooperating disc blades.